Waitlist

When a session sells out, the demand doesn’t stop — it just stops being visible. A waitlist captures it. Customers who arrive at a sold-out buy page can leave their name and email, and when tickets come back you can email the whole list at once.

That happens more often than you’d think: a held allocation released, comps returned to the sales pool, a capacity increase after the venue reconfigures, or a cancelled booking.

Turning the waitlist on

The waitlist is set per session, and it’s off until you turn it on.

1. Open the session and go to its Waitlist tab.
2. Switch Enabled? on.

That’s all it takes. Nothing changes on the buy page while tickets are still available — the form only appears once the session is genuinely sold out.

Tip

Turn the waitlist on when you create a session that you expect to sell out, not after it does. It costs nothing while tickets are available, and the sell-out is exactly the moment you’d otherwise be scrambling to switch it on.

What the customer sees

Once the session is sold out and the waitlist is enabled, the buy page shows a Join the Waitlist panel in place of the ticket selection. The customer gives:

• First name and Last name
• Email address

There’s also a toggle to receive promotional messages from you more generally. It’s on by default, but it’s separate from the waitlist itself — someone can join the waitlist and switch it off, and they’ll still get the tickets-available email for this session.

Joining twice does nothing. If that email address is already on the list for that session, the platform quietly keeps the original entry rather than creating a second one.

Note

Someone already partway through a purchase won’t see the waitlist form — it’s hidden while they have tickets in their cart, so it can’t distract from a sale in progress.

The Waitlist tab

Each session’s Waitlist tab is where you work with that session’s list. At the top are five cards:

Card	What it counts
Waitlist	The Enabled toggle
Pending	Waiting, not yet emailed
Notified	Sent a tickets-available email
Converted	Went on to buy a ticket for this session
Cancelled	Left the list, or was removed by you

Below them is every entry with its email, status, when they joined, when they were last notified, and any notes. If the list has been emailed before, a line above the table tells you when and how many people it reached.

Converted is worked out for you. When a booking comes in for the session and the contact email matches someone on the waitlist, their entry flips to Converted automatically — you don’t mark anyone off by hand.

Removing a single entry

Entries that are still Pending have a Cancel button, which takes that person off the list. They’re excluded from every future notification for this session.

Use it when someone asks you directly to be taken off, or when you can see an address is a typo. Everything else — marking people as notified, recording that they bought — happens on its own as you email the list and tickets sell.

All waitlists across your account

To see every session with a waitlist in one place, go to Ticketing → Waitlists. Each row is a session, showing the artist, showtime and venue alongside the same five counts — total, pending, notified, converted and cancelled.

A toggle at the top switches between Future Shows Only (the default) and All Shows, so past sessions stay out of the way until you want them.

Each row’s action menu takes you straight to that session’s View waitlist or to Send Email to List. This is the screen to open when tickets free up across several sessions at once, or when you just want to know where demand is sitting before deciding what to put back on sale.

Emailing the waitlist when tickets become available

This is the point of the whole feature: you’ve got tickets to sell again, and there’s a list of people who already told you they wanted them.

1. Release the tickets first — increase capacity, release unused comps, or reopen a category. Do this before you send, so the buy page works when people arrive.
2. Open the session’s Waitlist tab and click Send Email to List. (The button only appears when there’s somebody to email.) You can also reach it from the row menu on Ticketing → Waitlists.
3. Check the audience banner at the top — it shows how many people will receive it and how many are on the list in total.
4. Pick an email template, or write the email from scratch.
5. Set the subject.
6. Compose the body in the editor.
7. Click Send Email to List and confirm.

Emails are queued rather than sent one by one, so a large list won’t hold up the page. You’ll get a confirmation telling you how many were queued.

Who receives it

Status	Receives the email?
Pending	Yes
Notified	Yes — a repeat send reaches them again
Converted	Only if you untick Skip people who already bought
Cancelled	Never

Skip people who already bought is ticked by default, and it’s usually what you want — there’s no sense telling someone tickets are available when they already have one. Untick it if the email is really an announcement to everyone who ever showed interest.

Duplicate email addresses are collapsed to one message, so nobody gets the same email twice because they joined the list twice under different capitalisation.

Cancelled entries are excluded and can’t be brought back by any option on this screen. If someone has left the list, they stay off it.

Personalising the email

The editor supports tokens that are filled in per recipient when the email goes out:

Token	Becomes
{{ customer_first_name }}	Their first name
{{ customer_name }}	Their full name
{{ artist_name }}	The artist
{{ show_title }}	The session title
{{ show_date }}	The date and time
{{ venue_name }}	The venue
{{ room_name }}	The room
{{ venue_address }}	The venue address
{{ buy_url }}	A direct link to the session’s buy page
{{ leave_waitlist_url }}	A one-click link to leave the waitlist

Use the token dropdown next to the subject field to insert them without typing.

Tip

{{ buy_url }} is the one that matters most — it’s the link that turns the email into a sale. Put it somewhere obvious rather than at the bottom.

Every notification includes a way to leave the waitlist, which is what {{ leave_waitlist_url }} gives you. Someone who uses it is marked Cancelled and drops out of all future sends for that session.

Who the email comes from

For now, every waitlist email is sent from the funnylittleshows.com domain rather than your own. The same is true of the other emails the platform sends on your behalf — booking confirmations, reminders and the rest.

That has two practical consequences worth planning around:

• Recipients won’t recognise the sender address. Someone who joined a waitlist weeks ago is looking for your name, not ours. Lead with the artist and the session in the subject line so the email is recognisable before it’s opened.
• It may land in Promotions or spam. Nothing about the address ties back to a domain the recipient has corresponded with before.

Using {{ artist_name }} and {{ show_date }} in the subject does most of the work here. If you’re announcing a release through your own channels as well, it’s worth saying that the email will come from Funny Little Shows so people know what to look for.

Note

Sending from your own domain is on the roadmap. Until then, treat the from address as fixed — there’s no setting to change it.

Sending more than once

You can email the same waitlist as many times as you need to — when a second batch of tickets appears, say. There’s a 60 second pause between sends, which exists to stop a double-click sending twice; if you try again too soon you’ll be told how many seconds are left.

The Waitlist tab shows when the list was last notified and how many people it reached, so you can see at a glance whether a send has already gone out.

Note

A repeat send goes to everyone eligible, including people already marked Notified. There’s no “only the ones who haven’t been emailed” option — think of each send as an announcement to the list rather than a queue you work through.

Measuring whether it worked

The Converted count is the number to watch. Conversions are recorded automatically if a booking is made with the same email address as the waitlist member, after a notification was sent out. The gap between Notified and Converted on a session tells you how well the email did its job — and comparing the two across sessions tells you whether the subject line or the timing is worth changing.

Who can manage waitlists

Access is controlled by two permissions, set per role under Administration → Roles:

Permission	Allows
View Waitlist	Seeing the Waitlists list and each session’s waitlist tab
Manage Waitlist	Sending emails to a list and cancelling entries

Someone with view access only can see who’s waiting and how many, which is often all a box office needs.

Caution

A session that has waitlist entries can’t be deleted — you’ll be asked to remove the entries first or archive the session instead. The entries are a record of people who asked to be contacted, so the platform won’t quietly discard them.